EP82 Guest Episode: Emma Forrest: How to Make a Home That Heals After Life Changes

In this episode, I sit down with the brilliant, Emma Forrest, in her gorgeous, cosy, feminine home. 

Emma, is a novelist, memoirist and filmmaker, and her work is known for its emotional precision and unflinching honesty, exploring love, identity, grief, and the ways our past shapes who we become. 

From her early days as a teenage columnist interviewing cultural icons in 90s London, to her deeply personal memoirs and films, Emma has built a body of work that feels both intimate and expansive. Following divorce and a major life shift from Los Angeles back to London, Emma reflects on starting again, and what it’s meant to create a home from scratch, here in her home town, London. In this episode, we explore what home really is, not just the physical space, but the emotional architecture behind it. 

We talk about our shared childhood experiences of being othered, and how our childhood homes, loss, and movement across countries shape our sense of belonging. Emma shares how living in what felt like the “wrong” house for her, a new build devoid of history and texture, deeply impacted her mental health, and why she feels most at ease in spaces that carry stories. A quiet testament to just how profoundly our surroundings shape us. 

We also talk about Emma’s deep connection to light and views, and why she will always choose a top-floor, for openness, safety and epic views.

 As someone who loves entertaining and designing my entire home for that purpose, it was very interesting chatting to Emma about the reasons and need for creating a home for cocooning - a reminder that your home doesn’t have to perform for anyone else, but can simply just function for you alone, and hold you and yours. 

Towards the end of the episode, Emma shares something quite extraordinary, a deeply personal experience of mentally revisiting her childhood home, moving through it room by room, drawer by drawer, a moment that reminds us that the right home never truly leaves us. Closure doesn’t always arrive when we expect it to, and that sometimes we need to return, even if only in memory. It leaves us with a simple truth, that a well-lived home, much like a well-lived life, is never perfect, it is layered, shaped by change, and sometimes chaos, and filled with traces of everything that came before. 

This is one of my favourite episodes so far, and I hope it will resonate deeply with anyone drawn to the emotional side of making a home. And the ways identity, belonging, and personal history shape the spaces we can create to make a home that help to heal us after life throws us a curveball. 

You can find Emma here:
Instagram
Substack

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Hi, I’m Tash South — interior designer, renovation consultant, and founder of South Place Studio.

In this podcast, I share practical renovation advice, along with deeper insights into home and belonging.

If you’d like more resources and support, head to:
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Transcript

Meet Emma Forrest

Tash South 0:00

So my guest today is the remarkable writer Emma Forrest, a novelist, a filmmaker whose work is known for its emotional honesty and piercing insight into the complexities of love, identity, and the stories we inherit from our past. Emma began a career extraordinarily young. At just 15, she was already writing for The London Evening Standard and soon after left school to write a Generation X column for the Sunday Times, interviewing musicians and documenting youth culture in the 1990s. From there she went on to write for publications including Vogue, Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, Enemy and The Guardian, building a reputation as one of the most distinctive voices of her generation. Emma has written a number of novels, including Name Dropper, Thin Skin, Cherries in the Snow, Royals, and most recently Father Figure. Her memoir Your Voice in My Head became a hugely influential work about grief, therapy and survival, while her late memoir, Busy Being Free, explores divorce, independence, and rebuilding a life on your own terms. She's also worked extensively in film and television as a screenwriter and a director, making her directorial debut with a feature film Untogether, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Emma and I have been friends for a while. We met when our daughters were in school together. And you know when you have one of those people in your life where small talk just doesn't cut it, and you form almost instantly into deep conversation every time you meet. Emma is one of those people. I'm not usually an over-emotional person, but when Emma and I meet, we almost always always are both crying approximately 10 minutes into the conversation. Five minutes. That is very beautiful, thank you. So, Emma, where shall we begin? There is so much I want to do talk to you about in this episode, and um I know we could go on for hours, but so we've known each other for a few years through our daughters being at school. The one thing I've always admired about you is how deeply you think about identity and belonging. You write and speak about your high school experience often, and it seems to be a great driver for your work. Um and from what you write, you didn't have the best time at school. And I think we both kind of hold this shared experience of kind of otherness from our teenage years, and you I think because, like you're right, by being one of the only Jewish girls in your school, and me from being a brown girl navigating childhood and really racially segregated in South Africa. Um so I know that feeling of being kind of slightly outside the room. I know that has shaped a lot of my own sense of self and seeing the world. And I'd love to explore how that feeling might have shaped who you are today. And also I'm really curious to talk to you about your teenage years. You started your career so young and in many ways, you were a bit of a prodigy, really, and being known as one of the youngest columnists and celebrity interviewers of your time. But before we go deep, and as we always seem to do, I'd love you to bring our listeners in on your childhood and your background.

Childhood Roots And Early Independence

SPEAKER_01 3:56

Ooh, okay. Um, well, my mum's American, my dad's English, they're still together. I think that's very significant because it's quite rare for people not divorced, and also it's significant for me because I t took until sort of middle age to understand. I thought I should be looking for another crazy person because both my parents feel quite crazy and a way, like very loving, quite nuts. So I thought I was supposed to just find like the crazy person to share my crazy with.

SPEAKER_03 4:35

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

Um, and it's only quite deep in that I realized you have to have complementary neurosis. Like that my parents are very my mum seems to get um relaxation and comfort out of worrying about people. And my dad was sent to boarding school when he was teeny tiny, like in a way that just feels barbaric today. Um, so you've got someone who wants their mum, and someone who really likes worrying about everyone, and both of those things to a neurotic degree, but they fit brilliantly. So I think that's where I want wrong. I went wrong not realizing until pretty recently that the craziness has to be compatible. Um so I enjoyed um movies with them. Part of the the the the crazy aspect that was really helpful in me becoming a creative was that I think I was via them seeing and listening to things that I was probably too young to understand, um, whether it was theatre or movies or music. But before you can understand what those plays are about, before you can understand what the David Lynch film is about, you learn the rhythm of good writing. You learn that rhythm. So I think that was huge for me as well. And then the other thing that's probably significant to your podcast is that I grew up until the age of I think 12. A street away from Tate Britain, what's an apple Tate Britain? So was there a lot. Um, sometimes just wondering. But as a first, you know, when you're you you have a you know almost adolescent daughter and you watch their first steps alone of like going to the corner shop alone to buy a Kit Kat. And it would be that my first steps into trying on independence would would have been at the tapes because it was so near, so that's really significant as well.

Losing A House And Finding Stories

Tash South 6:38

I just think that you've just had this most fascinating life, and you know, that's just so far. Um, and like I said, you're English, but you've lived and worked in New York and LA for a number of years. Yeah. And I bet people always want to dig into your kind of celebrity past and those Hollywood relationships, which of course is fascinating within itself. But today, really, I did want to go deeper and talk about um how all of those experiences affected your idea of home, both as your kind of house, as your four walls, but also then as country and your sense of belonging and the world as a whole.

SPEAKER_01 7:19

Yeah, well, so another piece that was very significant is that so grew up in this house right this old tall house right near the Tate, and then when I was 12, the house was taken back by the bank, and we moved in with my grandparents for a little bit, and then um we moved into a house that was I I think they would agree with me, it was the wrong house for us, and we spent the rest of my childhood there in a you know me, so you know, I have an allergy to new build places. They really freak me out, and and I actually this sounds like I'm laying the blame on my parents, which I'm definitely not trying to do, but I think I wonder if I would have had the same um mental health struggles that began in my teenage years. If I'd it sounds insane if I'd been in the old house, or if not in that old house, in an old house, because something that really did my head in about the new build, about any new build, is as a creative, and I already was a creative at 12, like that was in my soul. I need to be having conversations with the spirits that have been there before. Like, I don't mean literal ghosts, but like that presence that's chatty in an old place. Yeah, I've had a life there before. You know, I love vintage clothes, and it's that it's like stepping into something that's already been worn, that's already had a life. You talk about your perception that I've had a big life, and I think a lot of that has potentially been about rubbing up against other big lives, you know, whether it's the old clothes I've collected or always gravitating towards renting. Um when I lived in Los Angeles, uh Art Deco, a beautiful Ardeco apartment, just to hear those chatty voices that had been through as much as you've been through. And I think what really psychologically messed me up about being in a new build was that I didn't feel like there was anything to bounce off. Like the silence of it. Yeah. I hated it, and I think, in fairness, I think my I definitely know, I don't think my mum liked it at all either. But we would have been there for about 10 years, I think, and it was just wrong for us, but that's where we were.

Tash South 9:42

Yes, I think, and that I guess w whatever's happening in your life or your childhood or your family's life, you kind of have to, you know, the parents, we we do what we can do to to get the fac keep the family going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um but it's such a bourgeois complaint because there's a roof over your head, but I'm just yes, but it like I can see what you're you're saying about missing the stories that might have been there because you're a storyteller. Yeah, yeah. So you kind of needed that.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

We've also talked about this before. I can live in a very small space, but I need a big view. Yes. That's what I've got to do. Which will be a sense of hope. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Tash South 10:18

Okay, so you were married to quite a famous actor, but as we know, that didn't work out. And you decided to make this huge and I think very brave life-changing move from this celebrity life in LA to um your flat in North London. And I read this World of Interiors piece where you're right about going back to live with your parents for a little while, and you're right, no matter how far we get into adulthood, it can feel deflating to stay with one's parents, where the insecurities of adolescents cling to childhood walls like posters of idols. It felt more so for me when I got divorced and had to leave my home in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, to stay with them in deeper South London. And I wonder, could you speak a bit on that for us and how it came about and how you found that process of moving back, not only from LA, but also um kind of back to London and then to your parents' home and then eventually to a place of your own.

SPEAKER_01 11:16

Well, it is all a back and forth conversation with the demons, basically, because all of us travel, I mean, you certainly know this, all of us travel to leave behind the things that shaped us negatively. Yes. And you hope you end up in the right place where you get to construct yourself and it's not someone else's version of who they expect you or demand you to be. We're gonna stop crying. Um also a lot, I have to say, a lot of the times that we cried was also our kids were in primary school, so I I know I always walked in to meet you and I was like, I'm tired. I'm tired, I was just tired all the time, and then you cry so quickly.

Tash South 11:56

I still feel tired all the time. Yeah, but it's true.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

I know I'm probably getting into it too fast, but that's definitely influenced my sense of how to create a home. It's like if I am tired all the time, which I am, how do I make this a sleepy house? Like, this is not an apartment to invite people over. I don't mind you being here, that's fine. But I I do divide the world into people who've built where they live to entertain, you know, to have people over, to be sociable, and people who've built their place to cocoon, and that's what I've done. Like it's I don't have dinner parties, I don't really I'll invite someone over, but this is my place to rest, uh-huh, you know, and work. I mean, I left a house that I think was like 3,000 square feet for a place that's maybe 800 square feet if I'm lucky, probably more like 750. And what I found was, I mean, I I always say this is I was safe so long as I had the view, and I had an epic view in Silver Lake, LA of you know, you're you're in sort of a home that's carved into mountain terrain on a reservoir, and all those night lights twinkle. It kind of feels like living inside a jewelry box. Yes, um, it's incredible, but I have an unbelievably epic view here as well. I live at London's highest point in a top floor flat, um, and my office is in my attic. And so the space, the size of the space is irrelevant to me, I found. Um, and also when I say it's all about the conversation back and forth with the demons, your previous question about um us connecting over, feeling like we were othered. I knew I did not want my kid, even if I it finances aside, whether or not I could or couldn't afford it, did not want her to go to private school because I felt that that had been a a colossal mistake for me. Like we didn't belong there. They said we didn't belong there, and they were right, we shouldn't have been there. So state schools that I found in LA weren't up to it. Um, there were a couple in New York that would have been great, but it was like a real lottery to get in, and there's just so many great state schools in the UK, it's a whole other culture. Yes. So that was sort of a F you to the demons of childhood, was like I'm not putting my kid through what I was put through.

Tash South 14:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

But I I knew that I didn't want my kid to have that sense of you're not supposed to be here. Um so that's why that's sort of a big reason that we came to London beyond being closer to my family.

Tash South 14:40

Yes, yeah. I I yeah, I totally get that. Um, yeah, from just from my own kind of childhood and school experience as well. Um, but yeah, so now we're sitting in your gorgeous flat, which you've talked about already a little bit, um, but you've really transformed it into this kind of cozy fen feminine space um for you and your daughter. And perhaps you can describe for the listeners um what you've thought you can see a tiny bit of it.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

Um I thought if I'm gonna live outside the world of men, I'm going all in. Um it has, I think the most expensive thing I have is in my bedroom, a pink chandelier from Murano. Um and that was something I was thinking when I looked around my flat and everything I have here. I have a lot of art here that friends made, some of whom aren't artists, you know, and it's still framed. Um I carried special things back from LA. I didn't want to be afraid to say, I'm not gonna bring these curtains that I had specially made for my daughter's beautiful nursery in Los Angeles when we had a huge house. I have to leave that behind. No, I wanted to feel like I was allowed to take the best. It's that idea, take what you like and leave the rest, you know. So I took what felt magical, and I didn't have to leave everything behind. And I love that I carried curtains all the way to London and remade them as a sofa or remade them as pillows, or that was a way of reminding myself in the place that I live. Things change shape, life changes shape. It you don't have to say that was a mistake. It wasn't a mistake, it was what it was. Yes, and we're somewhere else now, but you can take bits of it that still move you.

SPEAKER_02 16:39

Of course.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

My best friend in LA, one of my best friends, Andrea. I wish I had this pic, I don't know where it is right now, but my favourite picture of her is in the last days of moving out of that family home in LA that was so grand. Um, she she was helping me take down curtains that I had, you know, like I was I was the wife, so I was the whether it's right or wrong, I was the one who had the curtains made and sourced the material and found the material I wanted in Thailand and this material in Japan, and had them special ordered and custom made. And Andrea helped me take them down, but there's a photo of her because I was gonna leave behind the dust ruffle that was on the curtains because it was too hard to like. I was just like, it feels petty to go in there. And she's like, No, there's a picture of her standing on the tiptoes with a screwdriver on the table to get the dust ruffle. She's like, You made the dust ruffle, you're taking the dust ruffle. I have the dust ruffle, I haven't done anything with it yet, but I will, you know, and that's a friend.

Imaginary Houses And Women Owning Life

Tash South 17:41

It takes, yes, it takes a lot to make a home, right? And it doesn't matter if you have to take one apart and make one somewhere else. You can take what's good from what was before and bring it into the new life. Okay, so I would love to talk about this. You gifted me this book called Real Estate by Deborah Levy once, and if I recall correctly, it was during COVID times. Yeah. And we were it was one of the many lockdowns, and you sent it to me in the post, it was a real copy of a real book and a real envelope that came with a real post, and I just thought, oh, this is such a treat to um get something in that time of isolation. And I remember that this book um was such a good book. It uses the idea of real estate as a metaphor for the space women claim for themselves emotionally, yeah, intellectually, creatively, and physically, and particularly in midlife. And after the end of her marriage in her 50s, Levi begins reimagining her life, and she's living in a small London flat, she's raising her daughters, and she's continuing her writing career. And one of her most memorable ideas in the book is this description of this imaginary house, and it's not a real building, it's this kind of mental architecture that she is constructing as we move through her book, and she starts adding things that she moves through that she really wants in this house, like a writing room, a library, a kitchen for conversation, which I actually really love to do. I always put somewhere to sit in a kitchen when I'm designing, and a space for solitude. And this imaginary house becomes a symbol for this life she's rebuilding, kind of piece by piece. But she keeps returning to this one question: what does it mean for a woman to own her own life? Not just a house or the possessions in it, but the territory of her own identity. And throughout the book, she reflects on independence, work, motherhood, love, money, aging, all through this lens of reclaiming her personal space. Which I have to say reminds me so much of your story.

SPEAKER_02 19:55

Yes, yeah.

Tash South 19:55

And I just would love to chat to you about this because um this concept of this book and a bit about what it means to you, and also, you know, if you had to build your own imaginary house, what would you put in it?

SPEAKER_01 20:08

Hmm. Well, it's funny because um, well, first of all, that that is one of my favourite books. It's also, I don't know if I've told you the backstory of part of the added magic of that book is I remember getting close to finishing it um at the Hampstead Heath Ladies' Pond. Oh, yes, which listeners probably know about, but if you don't, it's just like a haven for women where you can be as naked as you like. Every age, uh, well, not every age, I think you have to be over ten. Um it's just such a peaceful oasis. And I was reading this book, getting that childhood feeling of no, this book's gonna be over, and I was so, so, so, so sad. And I finished it and I went to leave. And as I was exiting, the author was walking in, Deborah. And it was like look, I just felt like I'd conjured her by magic. And I said to her, I is it is it okay? Can I please just quickly fan out on you? And what was so excellent was she took up space in real life. She was like, Yes, you may. And she took she she took my compliments as correct. I was right to love her writing. It modelled something really important for me. She wasn't at all big-headed, she wasn't arrogant. She's like, Yes, your opinion of me is the correct opinion. It's wonderful work, you know, like that's the vibe, and it made me so so happy. So, yes, I also have held to that idea of uh building what you deserve, what makes you feel free. The the conversation I've had in making my own apartment. Sorry, I cling to the American word sometimes, my own flat, and it's a conversation about being a woman is how to be free and how to be safe at the same time. Time when you uh it it comes up all the time that one of the great sorrows, probably the greatest sorrow to me, of being a woman is my favourite thing in the world is to listen to music through headphones, and I can't run with music in headphones at night. I can't. You can't.

Tash South 22:20

We can't like you just can't stuff we still can't do, and that's depressing.

SPEAKER_01 22:24

Devastating. So, in the context of my home, the the the story that's in Busy Bean Free is when I bought the flat, the the the attic floor just literally had like a ladder into into it. That that's what they these young, I think they're in their 20s, the people I bought from, have been using to get up and down. I was like, I have a five-year-old, I cannot, we cannot have this, and so I spent all like the biggest chunk I've spent on this house was on a bespoke safe staircase that I went on and on and on to the guy who built it about it had to enclose her so she couldn't fall through a spiral staircase, it had to be a particular size, there was no size that existed, it had to be made. But how could it be made beautiful? Yeah, so there's you know, designs and holes in each step so that the light changes through the day and casts different shadows on my wall through the stairs during the day, and that's just a pretty good example of something I wrestle with all the time: safety, but also a sense of freedom.

Tash South 23:32

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which sadly for women is is more difficult than it should be to live with those two things together.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

I mean, in in the old house in L in LA, and obviously when you're talking about America, you're talking about guns. So when you start thinking about break-ins and like you have this, do you have that? You're like, you have to think if someone breaks in, they may have a gun. It's a different conversation to have. And I remember this long exploration for um bars on my daughter's window. She was a baby. But did anyone make bars that were beautiful? That were like, could you get bars in the shape of koala bears? Like could you like that was the quest because otherwise it's just so crushing to look at them every time. Exactly.

When Spaces Trigger Mental Health

Tash South 24:19

Which I know very well because in in Cape Town in South Africa, every window has bars on it, and a lot of the time they're not beautiful, actually, most of the time they're not beautiful. Yeah. And yes, I guess it's almost for your daughter disguising, like disguising something really that's keeping her safe, yeah, but almost so she doesn't realise it's there to keep her safe isn't something too that can also be beautiful to look at. Yeah. That's such um such an interesting take on that. Um that actually brings us really nicely onto the next question because one of the things I love most about your writing and your interviews and our conversations is how you seem to just effortlessly and naturally just draw these unexpected and sometimes very funny parallels between the most unexpected things. And um, so lately I've been exploring writing about the parallels and effects between our surroundings and also our psychology and our mental health, and um just saying that reminds me of when I was in high school, and so when I was in primary school, I was in a racially segregated school for um brown-only people, and when I went to high school, that same year was the change where there was a sudden integration and the end of apartheid. So my primary school and my high school experience were completely different. My primary school was dark and dusty and dingy, and you know that I didn't realise how much that affected me until I went to this high school where it had previously been a four whites only school. Yeah, and I walked in, and you walked into this double height um entrance hall with all this gorgeous light and double staircases, and I just remember how that made me feel in that moment. It just made me feel like oh gosh, I feel like I could be a different person here, I feel like I could learn better here, I could be a better student, could get better grades, all of this. And so you write so beautifully about your own mental health and struggles, and I wonder if you have ever experienced this kind of thing and kind of which parallels you might draw.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

Absolutely. So one of the things that can confuse people, and I think it probably confused me for a long time, is because I've written fairly extensively about mental health, and because my best-selling book is Your Voice in my head, which is a mental health recovery memoir, um people think that I have an maybe a higher tolerance of troubled people than someone who hasn't experienced it, and actually I find for myself it's the opposite, because I'm I think I have a fear that it's infectious and that I'm so grounded and have been for a long time. I can translate what madness feels like, like I can explain to you what it felt like, but I don't want to be near it. So something that really freaks me out is going to the home of someone who seems troubled and being able to see it in their home. Um now I am far, far, far, as you know, from a neat freak. I have too much stuff. Um I can look around my own home and go, this has to go because it's making it looks like anarchy and it's making me feel crazy. I'm not a minimal minimalist, I love maximalism, I love, you know, uh wallpapers and I love uh different fabrics and different uh you know like velvet next to Angora and all of that sensual uh combinations and textures. I love all of that. Um so it's not that I'm looking for minimalism, but when I walk into someone's home who already feel is uh boundaryless and I see the literalism of that, but things don't belong there, you know, that I that is in everything is overflowing, it frightens me. So I think knowing how other people's homes affect me, um also with travel as a consideration, like uh my daughter is about to be 13 and sh you know she loves, loves, loves K-pop. So her gift for me is we are finally going to Korea in the fall. And I've been looking at the different beautiful little tannocks that the traditional Korean homes you can rent on Airbnb versus a hotel. And for me, it's always a risk because if I get somewhere and it feels wrong, I usually have to live, like I have to sort it out and go and leave. Yeah, it's I'm very porous, it's what makes me a good writer.

SPEAKER_02 29:27

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 29:28

Um, is I am a skin too thin. You know, you talk about people being thick skinned, I'm missing a layer of skin. So what feels like a pinprick to other people feels like a knife in the heart to me, and I get the same with properties, with hotels, with rentals, and with other people's homes. Yes. Um that's so interesting. So it's a problem, it's it's it's it's a problem as in I have I know it about myself the same way I know I can't, you know, someone would be like, oh, you have to watch this horrifying show. I'm like, I it's too dangerous for me. I don't know how I'm gonna react. I don't know if it's gonna get under my skin and mess me up. Yeah, and it's the same with people's houses.

SPEAKER_02 30:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 30:11

It's probably another reason that I kind of cocoon.

Tash South 30:14

That makes a lot of sense, and also that really it takes me back to when you were talking about moving to that new house and why it didn't feel well you want you need things to feel right for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. Um Yeah, I guess the idea of home is such a it's such a loaded word emotionally, isn't it? It's it's kind of supposed to mean like a haven and a safe place where where you can be yourself, and I think for many of us it hasn't always been true, and I think for a lot of people sometimes it currently isn't even true. And has like has your definition of fe the feeling of a home changed over time? I mean, and if so, what does that mean to you now? I guess you've had quite a few homes as you've moved through.

SPEAKER_01 31:04

I think getting getting um older means being aware of, I'm not gonna say failings, not aware of your failings, being aware of I'm not gonna say kinks either, being aware of your peculiarities, your peculiar your peculiarities, even if you have not found a way to fix them, if you have not found a way to rewire them. So if I know that I'm someone who's tired, like I sit in rooms that I mean, maybe someone will call and be like she needs an iron supplement or something, but um, and if I know that I have a history with even if I've been steady for years and years and years and like literally probably almost decades, one thing with houses is I have to go to the light. I never ever ever rent a ground floor, ever. A basement will be out of the question. I go to the top floors of everywhere that I rent. Um, and that's purely about being bathed in in light and the view. Um I always now that I have a kid, it's what mothers do. She always gets the bigger bedroom wherever we've lived. But I think that's the cocoon thing as well, is I take the smaller space and I make it into a nest. Um and uh one of the the things that actually it's such a small, it feels like such a small thing, but I think it's really changed how I sleep is this flat is the first time that I've painted the ceiling of my bedroom as well as the walls. Yes, that's very casooling. I tell you what a massive difference that so my uh my bedroom is like a tea green, I think it is. As well, and I worried that because it's the smaller room, it's much smaller than hers. Was that gonna make it? But no, it feels like I'm living inside a jewelry box and I love it.

Tash South 33:07

I love that description as well. Yeah, I think yeah, I think the first time I heard someone say that was when you said it to me. It was kind of living inside a jewelry box because it just, you know, you can suddenly and instantly imagine what that feels like.

SPEAKER_01 33:20

And it means you are the jewel.

unknown 33:22

Yes.

Tash South 33:25

So, Emma, now I want to talk to you about the chateau mum. Well that's it is for those who don't know, and I didn't really know because I've never been in, but it's this famous hotel in LA that I know you love, and I believe it's because it has this kind of mythic Hollywood, or it is and has been this kind of um mythic Hollywood refuge for writers and musicians and actors. And you once wrote that hotel rooms are funny things, they make everything look different, and writers often say about the Chateau Mamon that it feels like it feels less like a hotel and more like a house that has absorbed all of the secrets of everyone who's stayed there before, all of those stories. And I just love the idea, and you do as well, of the buildings quietly collecting these human stories. And so I've never been, and I will let you talk about it because I know you know it well, and I know you'll talk beautifully about it, and describe its magic much better than I ever could. So please tell us why is this hotel so special to you?

SPEAKER_01 34:37

So we actually went back there for the first time in years and years and years this Christmas. I took my daughter, um, I haven't been able to go to LA or America in a really long time. And I've been staying there since I was 12. We first, me and my sister first stayed there with a friend who her and her mum would had a suite for the summer, and we were on a house exchange with my parents in Venice Beach in a pretty grotty house, and they invited us over, and we ended up just like setting up camp beds in our friend Tara's room, and it was absolutely magic. And the thing about the chateau is it's it's definitely shaped from such a young age, from 12, my view of my perception of luxury and how it should feel. It's not like my horror idea is the Kardashian version where it's like clinical and all those white water that looks like a madhouse to me. Um it has to have texture, and there have to be this is really important. It's a really luxurious hotel where some of the stuff doesn't work because it's so old, like there's cracked missing tiles in the beautiful bathroom tiling. The water pressure is not amazing because it's hard to make water pressure amazing in some way that was built in like 1921.

SPEAKER_02 36:01

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 36:02

Um so that idea of like seeing the little parts that have sprung loose in the beauty of something is probably akin to the Japanese idea wabisabi, like the beauty of the imperfect, which is a book that also in a thinking that also really had a big effect on me. And Shateau what's also really important is like all kids, I was really afraid of ghosts. Chateau Marmont definitely is ghosty, but they absolutely mean you no harm. So it also reshaped my idea that there's a it's kind of narcissistic to be afraid of ghosts. Why are you better than them? Why are you less frightening than a ghost? You're not. They've done things you haven't done.

SPEAKER_04 36:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:53

Um, the idea that in that part of Hollywood, in the Hollywood Hills, there's two periods that really fascinate me, and I love them living on top of each other. One is the Laurel Canyon scene of the 60s, that's the music of Joni Mitchell, of the Mamas and the Papas, um, of Crosby Stills and Nash, and that's all in the same place that the silent film stars were living in. So I imagine those ghosts visiting each other before they visit me when I'm there. Um, the owner of the Chateau Mamma, Andre Balaz, I once asked him if he had seen ghosts while staying at his own hotel, and he told me this amazing story. He said, Oh yeah, I woke up in my bed, and there was a couple on the end of my bed in a beautiful embrace, locked in an embrace. And I was like, What did you do? And he said, I felt like I was intruding on their moment, so I just very carefully and quietly closed my eyes and made myself go back to sleep because it was too intimate and I shouldn't have been there, rather than them not being near you. Chateau's really brilliant for that. It has a very palpable creative energy, it has a palpable energy, and you have to accept when we talk about oh, you can feel the energy, that isn't always gonna be good energy. Sometimes it's gonna be confronting, yeah. Um, and that's why it's such a great place to write.

Tash South 38:15

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:16

Oh, it sounds amazing.

Tash South 38:17

That's the story's gonna be goosebumps.

unknown 38:19

You'll go.

Tash South 38:20

I will go. I will go. To end our conversation, um, and because I do just think you've had this most incredible life, and that's just so far. I would just wanted to ask one more question, and that is um, I feel like we've been talking about a well-lived home has stories and marks and wear and tear, and you know, evidence of life, but what do you think it is that makes a life feel truly lived in?

SPEAKER_01 38:51

Ooh, that's such a good question. Okay, this isn't the reply you may have been expecting. I had a I've just told you that I went back to the chateau for the first time in a long time. Um, there was a night when I sent my daughter to her old babysitter, who we're still in contact with, you remember you now. Yes. Um and the honest truth is as someone who through my teenage years, through through probably through most of my twenties, I was probably what would be called straight edges, as in I I didn't drink, I didn't smoke, I didn't take drugs. An interesting thing happened in California when they legalized cannabis, is that every mum I knew was not gonna turn down this gift, was not gonna turn down this great gift. So people like dropping their kids at school and then taking a gummy. So ever since then, which would be like I think it happened five, six, seven years ago that they legalized cannabis. If I get a night alone in LA, it's a weed gummy for me. Like I'm not going out anywhere, I am not having, I'm not even having dinner with a friend. I want to be somewhere beautiful with my weed gummy. And what happened over Christmas with me and my weed gummy in California, because I'm so sensitive, like I've never taken acid and I never would because that terrifies me. High on this fantastic gummy, I visited the childhood home in my head, in the one the home that was taken away.

SPEAKER_04 40:27

Right.

SPEAKER_01 40:28

And I spent the evening by myself in my head visiting every floor, every room of that house, opening every drawer. And this I was telling my parents about this recently. I was like, I think it's because I'd never been a drug person.

Tash South 40:42

I have a quick question. Was it like was it like when you left it? Was it and I had all the stuff in the drawers? It was exactly this. Is what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_01 40:49

Okay, I opened every drawer. Right. And everything was the and I I had got everything right, like that was the sock drawer.

SPEAKER_02 40:57

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 40:57

That was meant to be the sock drawer, but somehow handkerchiefs had also gotten into there. Everything was correct, everything was and and it was so incredibly specific, and it's not something I think without being high on weed, I would have found my way back to, and it was profoundly moving. Wow, it it really touched me, and I think it was something I needed to do, yeah, was go back there as an adult by myself, yeah, and just go through everything, maybe one last time. Maybe I don't ever need to go back in there. Yeah, but it uh it's the best thing that's happened to me in a really long time.

Tash South 41:37

Yeah. Oh, well. Well that is perfect pulse, isn't it? That ends us ends it off beautifully because that's where we started. Yeah. And it obviously was what you needed because you weren't ready to leave that house. Yeah. And so you needed to go back there and do that, I think.

SPEAKER_01 42:01

Yeah, as an adult. Yeah. Yeah. Lovely. Thank you very much.